It's easy to get distracted while you're reading Carol Birch's 11th novel, and distraction is part of its point: in 19th-century Wapping, there are enough strange sights, pervasive smells and sounds and curious characters to keep most novelists – and readers – going strong for three times the number of pages that there are here. But beyond the blood, brine and slime that swills down the Ratcliffe Highway, above the stench of the rotting fruit and vegetables and the excrement of a thousand animals, lies a rather subtler story of the hazy line between camaraderie and rivalry and of the bonds both forged and broken in extreme adversity.

Jaffy Brown is only eight when he is rescued from the jaws of a Bengal tiger being transported through the London streets by its owner, Mr Jamrach, who rewards him for his bravery – and, one suspects, to quell any hint of scandal – with a raspberry cream puff and a job cleaning the animals' cages at his menagerie. Here, consignments of Tasmanian devils arrive to join Barbary apes, elephants, camels, snakes, wolves and all manner of birds; amid the squawking parrots and cockatoos and fluting bluebirds, it is the room of entirely silent birds, held in tiny, individual cells, that most disturbs Jaffy. Each specimen is destined for a collector, and the lively trade between seamen, importers and customers is deftly drawn from the historical record: the real-life Jamrach supplied London Zoo, PT Barnum and the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti with exotic animals (Rossetti took a wombat, among other rarities). A statue in what is now the Tobacco Dock shopping centre in Wapping, London, depicts the near-fatal meeting of a young boy and a tiger.

But Jaffy is Birch's creation, and his story relies on more than the evocation of a colourful historical milieu or the tried-and-tested fictional scenario of a child plucked serendipitously from impoverished obscurity and catapulted into an outlandish new life. Jaffy's progress is determined by two imperatives: his powerful attraction to the ships that wait in the Pool of London, "resting like pure-bred horses" before their next voyage, and his intense, painful relationship with Jamrach's assistant, Tim Linver, by turns cocky, bullying and fearful. When Tim is selected by Jamrach to accompany the seafarer Dan Rymer on a mission to the South Pacific to bring back what all except Jaffy refer to as a dragon – "It's not a dragon if it hasn't got wings," he protests, "not a real dragon" – Jaffy is compelled to join him on the crew of the creaky whaling ship Lysander.

As soon as she has built up the whores and shopkeepers, the alleyways and inns of east London, Birch abandons them, taking "the watery road out of town" and marooning us with a jumbled cast of old hands, determined adventurers and peculiar misfits; she also slides neatly into her next historical borrowing, that of the doomed whaleship Essex, sunk by one of its prey in 1820, the horrific experiences of its survivors part of the inspiration for Moby-Dick. One lightly sketched aspect of the novel deals with the passing of such ships, as the demand for whale oil gives way to "this new stuff". "What new stuff?" asks Jaffy. "Oil under the ground," comes the answer.

Again, though, Birch does more than simply recreate history. As in previous novels, such as The Naming of Eliza Quinn, which was set during the Irish famine, and Scapegallows, which drew on the story of Margaret Catchpole, a horse-thief transported to Australia, she conjures something far stranger and less immediately graspable than a straightforward recitation of facts would allow. Jaffy's journey is suffused with yearning – to find his place in the fluid but implacable hierarchy of the seamen, to understand the mysteries of the sea and its creatures and of the unknown and unknowable places that he witnesses. He narrates a succession of set-pieces – the slaughter of a whale, beneath "a fountain of blood that burst up and rained down from on high all over us", the capture of the "dragon", a monstrous giant lizard that emanates a "weary majesty" and finally submits to its incarceration on board the ship – as if he is recounting a dream, one filled with portentous symbols and imagery that he is trying to decode.

Watching the lizards feeding during the dragon-hunting expedition, "like eels slipping wormily over one another in a muddy tussle over a foul carcass, a red and pink rag trailing festoons", Jaffy reacts with terror at their alien behaviour; it is only later, when the Lysander has been wrecked and he is on the open sea with the remnants of its crew, that he begins to apprehend the kind of imperatives that will come into play in the struggle for survival. This portion of the novel, with its grim working out of "the Custom of the Sea" – among other things, the code that governs the final resort to cannibalism – is rendered with exceptional control, elucidating the see-sawing bond between Jaffy and Tim and the gradual disintegration of the sailors' bodies and minds.

When we are eventually returned to Wapping, minus a few fellow-travellers, Birch has spun us a captivating yarn of high seas and even higher drama. But she has also managed to leave us understanding why some of the sailors who did make it back to the comparative safety of land are, despite their ordeals, so quick to set sail again.